The Law of Karma is Unknown and Unknowable

Transcription

1 The Law of Karma is Unknown and Unknowable Page 1 of 11

2 Abstract 1 The Unknowable is neither a force behind phenomena, nor some kind of energy storehouse. It is essentially the same as our Consciousness, persisting unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form. It has no kinship of nature with Evolution. Only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reäbsorbed by it at the end of time), are incorruptible and eternal. All else is illusion, corruptible and ephemeral the heresy and legacy of separateness. Divine thought cannot be defined, or its meaning explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who [if intellectually and ethically fit] can do so. Out of an Unknowable and Ever-Concealed Centre, Consciousness keeps unfolding, and infusing through the totality of artifacts: the mental agitates the molecular and mixes itself with the magnificent corporeal. Spirit and Matter are emanations of the One Reality, That Perfect Unmanifested Consciousness, or Non-Being. It is and It will remain forever unknown and unknowable. Personal consciousness is a differentiation in space and time of a ray of Universal Consciousness. On the subjective side is the One Life. On the objective, myriads of lives immanent in every atom of Matter. Matter is ever becoming, according to ideal forms. The Kabbalists never cease to repeat that primal intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and negative. When Logos reposes in the bosom of Parabrahman, It cannot see Parabrahman other than as Mūlaprakriti, that mighty expanse of cosmic matter which veils Parabrahman from even the highest logoic perceptions. Parabrahman is ever unknown to Logos, as It is to ourselves. 1 Frontispiece by Alex Fishgoyt. Page 2 of 11

3 Over and around, higher and lower, within and without, Unknown Intelligence sustains the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creative Deities, and all creatures. It is the Spirit of God that keeps moving upon the face of the waters of Creation. The Eternal Breath cannot know Itself by Itself because it is devoid of selfconsciousness. Neither can the Infinite know the Finite, for that matter. It can only know aspects of Itself through Its acting powers. Nor Scripture lays down a set of definitions any more than Nature does. Karma is one with the Unknowable, an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of manifestation. Karma is the Unknown Deity of the old Athenians, the One Law for All, and vice versa. The highest Deity is subject to this Law, or rather it is the Law of the Deity. Page 3 of 11

4 I don t pretend to understand the Universe it s a great deal bigger than I am.... People ought to be modester. Thomas Carlyle 1 All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The Good is beyondbeautiful, beyond the Highest, holding kingly state in the Intellectual-Kosmos, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as Intelligence in us. Our intelligence is nourished on the propositions of logic, is skilled in following discussions, works by reasonings, examines links of demonstration, and comes to know the world of Being also by the steps of logical process, having no prior grasp of Reality but remaining empty, all Intelligence though it be, until it has put itself to school. Plotinus 2 The Unknowable is neither a force behind phenomena, nor some kind of energy storehouse. It is essentially the same as our Consciousness, The unknowable of Herbert Spencer 3 bears only a faint resemblance to that transcendental Reality believed in by Occultists, often appearing merely a personification of a force behind phenomena an infinite and eternal Energy from which all things proceed Theosophy rejects the Spenserian He and substitutes the impersonal IT for the personal pronoun, whenever speaking of the Absolute and the Unknowable. And it teaches, as foremost of all virtues, altruism and self-sacrifice, brotherhood and compassion for every living creature, without, for all that, worshipping Man or Humanity. 5 Herbert Spencer has of late so far modified his Agnosticism, as to assert that the nature of the First Cause, 6 which the Occultist more logically derives from the Causeless Cause, the Eternal, and the Unknowable, may be essentially the same as that of the Consciousness which wells up within us: in short, that the impersonal reality pervading the Kosmos is the pure noumenon of thought. 7 1 Thomas Carlyle s remark to Wm. Allingham, quoted in D.A. Wilson s & D. Wilson McArthur s Carlyle in Old Age. 2 Plotinus: Ennead I, viii On the Nature and Source of Evil, 2; (tr. MacKenna & Page) 3 [Herbert Spencer, , English philosopher. His particular interest was in evolutionary theory which he expounded in Principles of Psychology in 1855, four years before Darwin s The Origin of the Species, which Spencer regarded as welcome scientific evidence for his own a priori speculations and a special application of them. He also applied his evolutionary theories to ethics and sociology and became an advocate of social Darwinism, the view that societies naturally evolve in competition for resources and that the survival of the fittest is therefore morally justified. Abridged from Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1990] 4 Secret Doctrine, I pp Blavatsky Collected Writings, (THE BABEL OF MODERN THOUGHT) XIII p The first presupposes necessarily something which is the first brought forth, the first in time, space, and rank and therefore finite and conditioned. The first cannot be the absolute, for it is a manifestation. Therefore, Eastern Occultism calls the Abstract All the Causeless One Cause, the Rootless Root, and limits the First Cause to the Logos, in the sense that Plato gives to this term. 7 Secret Doctrine, I pp Page 4 of 11

5 Persisting unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form. It has no kinship of nature with Evolution.... Only the First Cause and its direct emanations, our spirits (scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reäbsorbed by it at the end of time), are incorruptible and eternal. 4 Thus Spencer, who, nevertheless, like Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, only reflects an aspect of the old esoteric philosophers, and hence lands his readers on the bleak shore of Agnostic despair reverently formulates the grand mystery: that which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the Universe presents to us, is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit in Space and without beginning or end in time. It is only daring Theology never Science or philosophy which seeks to gauge the Infinite and unveil the Fathomless and Unknowable. 1 Ideas, in their very nature and essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary, are opposed to absolute THOUGHT, that unknowable ALL of whose mysterious operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that it has no kinship of nature with Evolution, 2 which it certainly has not. 3 At the hour of the Pralaya, the two aspects of the unknowable deity, the Swan in darkness Prakriti and Purusha, nature or matter in all its forms and Spirit no longer subsist but are (absolutely) dissolved.... There will be, as there ever were in time and eternity, periodical dissolutions of the manifested Universe, but (a) A partial pralaya after every Day of Brahmā; (b) And a Universal pralaya the MAHĀ-PRALAYA only after the lapse of every Brahmā s age. 5 All else is illusion, corruptible and ephemeral the heresy and legacy of separateness. Hence Non-Being is ABSOLUTE Being, in esoteric philosophy. In the tenets of the latter even Ādi- Buddha (first or primeval wisdom) is, while manifested, in one sense illusion, Māyā, since all the gods, including Brahmā, have to die at the end of the Age of Brahmā ; the abstraction called Parabrahman alone whether we call in Ain-Soph, or Herbert Spencer s Unknowable being the One Absolute Reality. The One Secondless Existence is 1 Secret Doctrine, I p. 19 fn. 2 Principles of Psychology, Secret Doctrine, II p Isis Unveiled, I p. 502; [quoting Hermetic axiom] 5 Secret Doctrine, I p. 552 Page 5 of 11

6 ADVAITA, Without a Second, and all the rest is Māyā, teaches the Advaita philosophy. 1 Divine thought cannot be defined, or its meaning explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who [if intellectually and ethically fit] can do so. 2 Out of an Unknowable and Ever-Concealed Centre, Consciousness keeps unfolding, and infusing through the totality of artifacts: The mental agitates the molecular and mixes itself with the magnificent corporeal. 5 Whatever St. Paul may have had in his profound mind when declaring to the Athenians that this unknown, ignorantly worshipped by them, was the true God announced by himself that Deity was not Jehovah, 3 nor was he The Maker of the world and all things. For is not the God of Israel but the Unknown of the ancient and modern Pantheist that dwelleth not in temples made with hands. 4 The nous of the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) mind, or mens, Mahat, operates upon matter in the same way; it enters into and agitates it: Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus, Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. 6 In the Phœnician Cosmogony, Spirit mixing with its own principles gives rise to creation also; 7 the Orphic triad shows an identical doctrine: for there Phanēs (or Erōs), Chaos, containing crude undifferentiated Cosmic matter, and Chronos (time), are the three co-operating principles, emanating from the Unknowable and concealed point, which produce the work of Creation. And they are the Hindu Purusha (Phanēs), Pradhāna (chaos), and Kāla (Chronos) or time.... [Wilson] remarks that as presently explained, the mixture [of the Supreme Spirit or Soul] is not mechanical; it is an influence or effect exerted upon intermediate agents which produce effects. The sentence in Vishnu Purāna: 8 As fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the Supreme influenced the elements of creation, the reverend and erudite Sanskritist correctly explains: As perfumes do not delight the mind by actual contact, but by the impression they make upon the sense of smelling, which communicates it to the 1 Secret Doctrine, I p. 54 fn. 2 ibid., I p Acts xvii, ibid., [On the Hellenes who alone had dared to raise publicly an altar to the UNKNOWN GOD.] 5 Virgil: Aeneid VI, ; (tr. Casten). Cf. Virgil s mens agitat molem in our Mystic Verse and Insights Series. 6 [ibid., VI, 726 et seq.] 7 Brücker i, Bk. I, ch. ii Page 6 of 11

7 mind, adding: The entrance of the Supreme Vishnu into spirit, as well as matter, is less intelligible than the view elsewhere taken of it, as the infusion of spirit, identified with the supreme, into Prakriti or matter alone. He prefers the verse in Padma Purāna: He who is called the male (spirit) of Prakriti... that same divine Vishnu entered into Prakriti. 1 This view is certainly more akin to the plastic character of certain verses in the Bible concerning the Patriarchs, such as Lot 2 and even Adam, 3 and others of a still more anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to Phallicism, Christian religion being honeycombed with it, from the first chapter of Genesis down to the Revelation. 4 Spirit and Matter are emanations of the One Reality, That Perfect Unmanifested Consciousness, or Non-Being. It is and It will remain forever unknown and unknowable. Personal consciousness is a differentiation in space and time of a ray of Universal Consciousness. On the subjective side is the One Life. On the objective, myriads of lives immanent in every atom of Matter. [The Occultist] maintains that Spirit and Matter are two FACETS of the unknowable UNITY, their apparently contrasted aspects depending, (a) on the various degrees of differentiation of the latter, and (b) on the grades of consciousness attained by man himself. This is, however, metaphysics, and has little to do with physics however great it its own terrestrial limitation that physical philosophy may now be. 5 Man is certainly no special creation, and he is the product of Nature s gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human tabernacle. That which lives and thinks is man and survives that frame, the masterpiece of evolution is the Eternal Pilgrim, the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute unknowable. 6 [Fohat] is One and Seven, and on the Cosmic plane is behind all such manifestations as light, heat, sound, adhesion, etc., etc., and is the spirit of ELECTRICITY, which is the LIFE of the Universe. As an abstraction we call it the ONE LIFE; as an objective and evident Reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which begins at the upper rung with the One Unknowable CAUSALITY, and ends as Omnipresent Mind and Life immanent in every atom of 1 Wilson, Vol. I, pp fn. 2 Genesis xix, iv, 1 4 Secret Doctrine, I pp fn. et seq. 5 ibid., I p ibid., II p. 728 Page 7 of 11

8 Matter. Thus, while science speaks of its evolution through brute matter, blind force, and senseless motion, the Occultists point to intelligent LAW and sentient LIFE, and add that Fohat is the guiding Spirit of all this. Yet he is no personal god at all, but the emanation of those other Powers behind him. 1 Matter is ever becoming, according to ideal forms. The Kabbalists never cease to repeat that primal intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and negative... When Logos reposes in the bosom of Parabrahman, It cannot see Parabrahman other than as Mulaprakriti, that mighty expanse of cosmic matter which veils Parabrahman from even the highest logoic perceptions. Parabrahman is ever unknown to Logos, as It is to ourselves. Oh, my son, matter becomes; formerly it was; for matter is the vehicle of becoming. Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreated deity and foreseeing God. Having been endowed with the germs of becoming, matter [objective] is brought into birth, for the creative force fashions it according to the ideal forms. Matter not yet engendered, has no form; it becomes when it is put into operation. 2 Hence the Ain-Soph the UNKNOWABLE and the UNNAMEABLE which, as it could not be made manifest, was conceived to emanate manifesting Powers. It is then with its emanations alone that human intellect has to, and can deal. Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious creations of angels and the rest out of nothing, now find itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or miracle, and materialism. An extra-cosmic god is fatal to philosophy, an intra-cosmic Deity i.e., Spirit and matter inseparable from each other is a philosophical necessity. Separate them and that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of emotionalism. 3 This great circle (which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the point within the Boundless Circle) is the Avalokiteśvara, the Logos or Verbum of which Subba Row speaks. But this circle or manifested God is as unknown to us, except through its manifested universe, as the ONE, though easier, or rather more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahman during Pralaya, as our Ego is latent [in us] at the time of sushupti or sleep ; which cannot cognize Parabrahman otherwise than as Mūlaprakriti the latter being a cosmic veil which is the mighty expanse of 1 Secret Doctrine, I p.139; [on the Messenger of the primordial Sons of Life and Light, and the spirit of ELEC- TRICITY, which is the LIFE of the Universe. ] 2 ibid., I p. 281; [quoting Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great] 3 Secret Doctrine, II p. 41 Page 8 of 11

9 cosmic matter is thus only an organ in cosmic creation, through which radiate the energy and wisdom of Parabrahman, unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves. 1 Over and around, higher and lower, within and without, Unknown Intelligence sustains the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creative Deities, and all creatures. It is the Spirit of God that keeps moving upon the face of the waters of Creation. The Eternal Breath cannot know Itself by Itself because it is devoid of selfconsciousness. Neither can the Infinite know the Finite. Ideal nature, the abstract Space in which everything in the Universe is mysteriously and invisibly generated, is the same female side of procreative power in Nature in the Vedic as in every other Cosmogony.... behind and higher than the creative deity, there is a superior deity, a planner, an Architect, of whom the Creator is but the executive agent. And still higher, over and around, within and without, there is the UNKNOWABLE and the unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Emanations. 2 The Unknowable, referred to in various ways in Rig- Vedic verse, such as Nought Was, called, later on, Parabrahman ; the [Hebrew] (Ain, nothing, or the Ain-Soph of the Kabbalists), and again, the Spirit (of God) that moves upon the face of the waters, in Genesis. All these are identical. 3 To know itself or oneself, necessitates consciousness and perception (both limited faculties in relation to any subject except Parabrahman), to be cognized. Hence the Eternal Breath which knows itself not. Infinity cannot comprehend Finiteness. The Boundless can have no relation to the bounded and the conditioned. In the occult teachings, the Unknown and the Unknowable MOVER, or the Self-Existing, is the absolute divine Essence. 4 1 Secret Doctrine, I p ibid., II p ibid., II p ibid., I p. 56; & cf. ibid. And thus being Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute Motion to the limited senses of those who describe this indescribable it is unconsciousness and immovableness. Concrete consciousness cannot be predicated of abstract Consciousness, any more than the quality wet can be predicated of water wetness being its own attribute and the cause of the wet quality in other things. Consciousness implies limitations and qualifications; something to be conscious of, and someone to be conscious of it. But Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized and the cognition, all three in itself and all three one. No man is conscious of more than that portion of his knowledge that happens to have been recalled to his mind at any particular time, yet such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of, from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory. To forget is synonymous with not to remember. How much greater must be the difficulty of finding terms to describe, and to distinguish between, abstract metaphysical facts or differences. It must not be forgotten, also, that we give names to things according to the appearances they assume for ourselves. We call absolute consciousness unconsciousness, because it seems to us that it must necessarily be so, just as we call the Absolute, Darkness, because to our finite understanding it appears quite impenetrable, yet we recognize fully that our perception of such things does not do them justice. We involuntarily distinguish in our minds, for instance, between unconscious absolute consciousness, and unconsciousness, by secretly endowing the former with some indefinite quality that corresponds, on a higher plane than our thoughts can reach, with what we know as consciousness in ourselves. But this is not any kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconsciousness. Page 9 of 11

10 It can only know aspects of Itself through Its acting powers. Nor Scripture lays down a set of definitions any more than Nature does. 1 Karma is one with the Unknowable, an Absolute and Eternal Law in the World of manifestation... The marvels of the One Spirit of Truth, the everconcealed and inaccessible Deity, can be unravelled and assimilated only through Its manifestations by the secondary Gods, Its acting powers. While the One and Universal Cause has to remain forever in abscondito, Its manifold action may be traced through the effects in Nature. The latter alone being comprehensible and manifest to average mankind, the Powers causing those effects were allowed to grow in imagination of the populace and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever-present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists still less as fatalists: for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect in its effects in the phenomenal world.... Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of rebirth, or of the reincarnation of the same spiritual individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. The latter are like the various costumes and characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours. 3 1 Spinoza, Tract. Theol. Polit. [Scriptura non tradit definitiones, ut nec etiam Natura.] 2 Blavatsky Collected Writings, (THE ORIGIN OF THE MYSTERIES) XIV pp ; [on the deception and despotism of the Brāhmans. Cf. Ages later in the Fifth, the Āryan Race, some unscrupulous priests began to take advantage of the too easy beliefs of the people in every country, and finally raised those secondary Powers to the rank of God and Gods, thus succeeding in isolating them altogether from the One Universal Cause of all causes. ibid.] 3 Secret Doctrine, II pp ; Cf. Some theosophists, in order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind, as being better acquainted with the Greek than with Aryan philosophy, have made an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had the latter been known to the profane in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term would be unobjectionable. As it is, it has been too much anthropomorphized by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a morel feeling rather, says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the gods, and is pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that feeling was deified, and its personification became an ever-fatal and punishing goddess. Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, it has to be done in the triple character of the latter, viz., as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the latter is the goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty, Adrasteia the inevitable represents Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dikē, is the equitable goddess reserving her wrath for those alone who are maddened with pride, egoism, and impiety. (See Mesomēdes, Hymn to Nemesis, verse 2; in Brunck s Analecta II, 292. Cf. Decharme, Mythologie de la Grèce Antique, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphized in its various aspects, Karma is a highly philosophical truth, a most divine noble expression of the primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil, and ennobles our conceptions of what divine immutable Justice ought to be, instead of degrading the unknown and unknowable Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel tyrant, which we call Providence. ibid. fn. Page 10 of 11

11 Karma is the Unknown Deity of the old Athenians, the One Law for All, and vice versa. The Deity is subject to this Law, or rather it is the Law of the Deity... The Deity desires experience or self-knowledge, which is only to be attained by stepping, so to say, aside from self. So the Deity produces the manifested universes consisting of matter, psychical nature, and spirit. In the Spirit alone resides the great consciousness of the whole; and so it goes on ever producing and drawing into itself, accumulating such vast and enormous experiences that the pen falls down at the thought. How can that be put into language? It is impossible, for we at once are met with the thought that the Deity must know all at all times. Yet there is a vastness and an awe-inspiring influence in this thought of the Day and Night of Brahman. It is a thing to be thought over in the secret recesses of the heart, and not for discussion. It is the All. 1 1 Judge Letters, II (XV) p. 60 Page 11 of 11